Mystery and Evidence (September 2010) A piece for the New York Times’s ‘The Stone’ philosophy blog. I distinguish between science and religion on the grounds that -- although they both make factual claims -- scientific thinking involves rigorous sensitivity to evidence in a way religious thinking does not. I suggest that this is because religious thinking has at its heart a conception of the world as mysterious, and that this mystery is part of the meaning that the religious see in the world. I speculate that this difference might explain the worldwide appeal of religious thinking, an appeal science lacks.

Appearance and Reality (March 2007) This is the text of my inaugural lecture as Director of the Institute of Philosophy in London. In his bestselling book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking says that Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘the sole remaining task for philosophy is the logical analysis of language’ demonstrates how far philosophy has lost sight of its ambitions since the great days of Aristotle and Kant. I explain what Wittgenstein might have meant by this, if he did really say it (he didn’t). And I show how, far from being a ‘come-down’ as Hawking says, the project of early analytic philosophy fits squarely within a central traditional theme of Western philosophy: appearance and reality.

Knowledge of Mind and Knowledge of Brain (April 2007) This is the text of the 3rd ‘Brain and Mind’ public lecture in the University of Copenhagen, organised by Dan Zahavi at his Center for Subjectivity Research. I argue that the problem of consciousness is not a result of ignorance, but of confusion; we will not understand consciousness by coming to know some extra fact, but by re-arranging what we already know. In particular, reflection on consciousness shows that it is not a simple quality which attaches to every conscious state, and that it is therefore unlikely that it will be explained by being ‘correlated’ with a simple neural quality.

Why Humanism? (November 2007) This is the text of my Bentham Lecture at UCL. The Bentham lecture is an annual event, sponsored by the UCL Philosophy Department and the British Humanist Association. I took this opportunity to criticise (from an atheist’s point of view) some aspects of contemporary humanism: its tendency to see itself as an alternative to a religion as a world view; its exaggeration of the role played by religion as the cause of the world’s problems; its insistence that religion is irrational and not merely false; and its exaggeration of the importance of cosmological belief, both as a part of religion and as part of the response to it. I argue that atheists should tolerate religion, so long as its practioners obey the rule of law. This is not because their views are necessarily worthy of respect, but because we should be trying to achieve what John Gray calls ‘a type of toleration whose goal is not truth but peace’.

The Soul (March 2004) This is the text of my inaugural lecture as Professor at UCL. It was intended for a nonspecialist audience. It outlines and defends the importance of the Aristotelian concept of substance for understanding the mind and its place in nature.